The Reverend Al Green - Call Me

I used to spend a lot of time with a big, burly, corn-fed, Iowa farm boy who was referred to by his friends as Kirkbear. Aside from Curry, Kirkbear had the largest and most varied collection of recordings I've ever come across, and that's saying something. He once had to move because the floors were beginning to collapse under the weight of its mass.

One night Kirkbear was sitting around his house and decided to go out to get a beer. He made a few calls, but was unable to find anyone to join him so he slipped out by himself. He choose as his watering hole (less for the ambience than the numerous pool tables) a Des Moines dive, the Safari, that billed itself as the town's only "punk" bar. As the evening wore on and with a few beers under his belt he began taking money from the younger pool players and introductions were in order. When he was asked his name he told them, on a whim, he was the Reverend Al Green. These kids were astonished - where did a member of the clergy learn to play pool like that, and what was he doing in the Safari?!

The night progressed as he was introduced to more and more youths ("You won't believe it - this guy's a reverend!"). Kirkbear would meet each new acolyte with the same phrase: "How do you do? Call me The Reverend Al Green." More beers were purchased for him that night by strangers, he told me later, than at any other time in his life.

Not once was he called on it. Not once did someone "get it". This big ole white white boy worked his way through a night of free beers on the name of the greatest soul singer of the 70's.

Hey youth - Do yourself a favor and learn something so the next time some pasty guy cleans your clock at 8 ball he doesn't take you for free beers as well.

This is the shit.

amg:

Al Green reached his creative peak with the brilliant Call Me, the most inventive and assured album of his career. So silky and fluid as to sound almost effortless, Green's vocals revel in the lush strings and evocative horns of Willie Mitchell's superbly intimate production, barely rising above an angelic whisper for the gossamer "Have You Been Making Out O.K.." With barely perceptible changes in mood, Call Me covers remarkable ground, spanning from "Stand Up" — a call to arms delivered with characteristic understatement — to renditions of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and Willie Nelson's "Funny How Time Slips Away," both of them exemplary fusions of country and soul. Equally compelling are the album's three Top Ten hits — "You Ought to Be With Me," "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)," and the shimmering title cut. A classic.

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